Before he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis published a brief allegory called The Pilgrim's Regress. The story follows a young man named John, born in the land of Puritania. A strict Landlord there forces all his tenants to follow an endless list of rules, with threats of eternal torture for anyone who disobeys. John's only comfort lies in the sight of a magical island, sometimes glimpsed, far off in the east; filled with wizards, nymphs, laughter and (presumably) talking animals in waistcoats.
Like all good allegorical heroes, John sets off walking on a long and perilous road to reach his vision of paradise. Along the way he meets a Mr Enlightenment, befriends a fellow traveller named Vertue, sees the noble town of Clap-Trap, argues with the Clevers, runs away from the Spirit of the Age and then, in a cave, high up in the mountains, meets a hermit, named History, who tells him the story of other pilgrims like himself, back through the ages, inspired to abandon everything, searching for a vision no-one else could see.
'It does not always take the form of an island [History said]...What is universal is not the particular picture, but the arrival of some message, not perfectly intelligible, which wakes this desire and sets men longing for something East or West of the world... I have seen many in my travels. In Pagus it was sometimes, as I have said, an island. But it was often, too, a picture of people, stronger and fairer than we are... [I]n Medium Aevum... he sent them... a picture of a Lady. The people went mad over the new picture, and made songs that are sung still... one at least of the tenants carried this new form of the desire right up to its natural conclusion and found what he had really been wanting. He wrote it all down in what he called a Comedy.
'[I]n the land of Mr. Enlightenment... the Landlord did a curious thing: he sent them a picture of the country they were already living in - as if he had sent them a number of mirrors... And just as the pictures of the Lady in Medium Aevum had made the real women look different, so when men looked at these pictures and then turned to the real landscape, it was all changed.'
Monbiot’s vision seems to be partly like the veneration of nature followed in the land of Mr Enlightenment, but it differs by being filled with a kind of melancholy for nature it currently is. Instead, he venerates a wilder, more self-willed form of nature which existed before man came to dominate the land, and which he hopes may come to exist again. While the romantics saw nature as an untameable force, Monbiot instead sees it as something cowed by man, and miserably dwindling away under his mismanagement.
In Lewis' story, all of the pilgrims come up against the same impassable barrier: a Grand Canyon has opened up across the road leading to the land of pictures. An old woman name Mother Kirk, sat waiting by the side of the road, tells him the Canyon's name is Peccatum Adae, and it opened up in the spot where the Landlord's first tenants broke his first rule, which poisoned the land and forced the Landlord to issue hundreds complicated new rules to make life possible in the broken landscape. If he wishes to cross, she tells him, he must let her carry him over.
Like the pilgrim in the story, Monbiot rejects Mother Kirk's explanation. In Feral he singles out the doctrine of original sin as the cause of man's misery, rather than the description of it, and he believes that our various sins against nature have their ultimate root in Genesis, where man is given dominion over the animals, which makes us believe we can do whatever we like.
Like Dante's pilgrim, he wakes one day to find himself middle-aged and lost, saying 'I was struck by the smallness of this life. Somehow - I am not quite sure how it happened - I had found myself living a life in which loading the dishwasher presented an interesting challenge.'
Like Lewis’s pilgrim, he resolves to slip away to find a more vibrant world. Feral is partly a memoir of his journey, and partly an invitation for us to join him. 'If you are content with the scope of your life, if it is already as colourful and surprising as you might wish, if feeding the ducks is as close as you ever want to come to nature, this book is probably not for you. But if, like me, you sometimes feel that you are scratching at the walls of this life, hoping to find a way into a wider space beyond, then you may discover something here that resonates.'
Feral thrills with visceral, natural experiences: 'As I turned the bone [of the wild ancestor of the modern bull] over in my hands, feeling its weight, feeling the years fall away, feeling myself in that cave of Bronze Age junk, fall with them, I experienced what seemed like an electric jolt.'
Briefly, he argues that a self-willed, natural environment is the great missing piece of mankind’s puzzle, and that we should do everything in our power to return the least productive parts of our farmland to a state of nature, where we could reintroduce some of the animals that we are otherwise driving to extinction.
He tries to persuade a Welsh sheep farmer to support his campaign to bring back wolves. Currently, Welsh hill farms run a huge loss, and are only kept in existence thanks to government subsidies. Economically, his argument seems unanswerable. Eco-tourism would be far more profitable than sheep-farming. But the answer he gets from the sheep farmer cuts straight to the heart of Feral’s central problem: 'People say they want to reintroduce predators. Why? The wolves don’t miss being here. We’d be introducing them for the sake of alleviating human guilt about what we have done to the environment. Which is to meet a human need, not a wild need… My concern with rewilding is that it takes the people out.’
And although Monbiot fills every page of Feral with stories about people, not least himself, wrapped up in nature, the central charge sticks. His desire for a rewilded world seems uncomfortably close to a de-peopled one. It seems that humanity is the only species that must not be allowed to behave as its nature dictates, and only where we fail does nature have a hope of succeeding.
Although Monbiot communicates the great joy to be found in seeing forests regrow, filled with boar, bison, wolves, and big cats, the best example he can give of it already happening is in Slovenia, where huge swathes of farmland have been left without owners thanks to the mass atrocities of the world wars and their aftermath under Marshal Tito. Recently, in an article in the Guardian, he gave a second example of rewilding: the forced exclusion zone around the Chernobyl power station.
He tries to square this same circle for much of the book. However much nature's triumphs seem to rely on mankind's defeat, he is unable to relinquish the sense that there is something urgently important for us to be found in encouraging nature to succeed.
Here is the great divide between animals and mankind: whales, as in the video above, only need to do what they feel like and everything will work out for the best. Just by swimming from where they feed to where they breathe, whales stir the ocean and clean the air. Just by pooing when they get the urge they enrichen the sea with food for plankton, that then becomes food for fish which the whales can eat.
Life for us is different. Our sewage is poisonous, needing to be flushed away as far as possible, as fast as possible. The only things that would grow in it otherwise are the plagues and diseases that swept through our cities before we built the sewers. Similarly, the way we choose to travel kills thousands of us a year in accidents, makes all of us unfit, clogs our lungs with fumes, gives asthma to our children, and undoes all the good work in the atmosphere done by the whales.
The reason is simple enough. Our intelligence lets us alter our behaviour at a speed far beyond nature's capacity to adapt. The whales’ faecal plumes are food instead of poison because whales, and whale-like animals, have been releasing the same kind of plumes for long enough that plants have adapted to thrive off them. By contrast, our cities, and our combustion engines have sprung up so suddenly that nothing in nature has had time to learn how to cope.
This is the paradox of progress: we always find solutions to our problems, but the solutions always seem to come with new, greater problems attached. We can use the ocean to do everything whales do: travel through its depths, catch fish, and dispose of our waste, but our intelligence only deals with each task in isolation. While the unintended consequences of the whales’ behaviour is uniformly positive, ours always seem to wreak some fresh havoc, either in an instant, or else built up slowly over years.
As Pope Francis says in Laudato Si’: 'Our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not yet developed the capacity to absorb and re-use waste and by-products. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production.’
This latest encyclical is a strongly worded call for the faithful to begin taking environmental concerns seriously. ‘It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So what they all need is an "ecological conversion".’
He gives the example of small mixed farms. These, he says, are less polluting than large scale industrial farms, and also offer a better environment for mankind to prosper. Since the market reduces a farm’s value to only what can be perceived by the consumer of its products and by the owner of the farm, the devastation wreaked by large scale farming, the cost of opportunities lost in nature it kills off, and the exclusion of thousands of potential farmers from the land, goes unrecorded in the balance of profit and loss.
Similarly, Feral discusses Scottish deer-stalking estates, which own an absurdly high percentage of currently unproductive, and ecologically barren, areas of rural Scotland. In their own terms they seem successful. Enough people are happy to pay for the service they provide (once the owners have pumped in their own money, for use as a status symbol), and the small number of people the deer-stalking industry employs are content with their wages. Neither the owners of the estates nor their customers are concerned that the land could be put to better use if deer numbers were reduced and wildlife was allowed to return, which means that the market is unable to see, much less solve, the problem, or encourage the emergence of better (and ultimately more profitable) uses of the land.
‘Civil authorities [says the Holy Father] have the right and duty to adopt clear and firm measures in support of small producers and differentiated production. To ensure economic freedom from which all can effectively benefit, restraints occasionally have to be imposed on those possessing greater resources and financial power.’
But to do this requires a change of heart in the public. If the laws tried to parcel up farmland or encourage diversity, it could easily be circumvented by farming corporations, repackaging themselves as services to “manage” groups of farms for smallholders. They would keep vast tracts of single crops growing in dead soil, and leave only lines drawn on maps to distinguish one small farm from another.
‘By learning to see and appreciate beauty, [says Pope Francis] we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple. If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realise that certain mindsets really do influence our behaviour.’
For Pope Francis, in Laudato Si’, the solution lies in a spiritual conversion. We need to look at the natural world and see Christ, just as generations of Christians have been told to see him in the poor and the hungry.
For George Monbiot things are, if no less urgent, perhaps a little less clear-cut. Sometimes he seems to be on the verge of some great spiritual declaration, but he has the classic Englishman’s reserve in spiritual matters. Several times in the book he begins to speak of some great meaning or providential cause to life, but always rows back and puts the whole thing down to either evolutionary biology or else to disturbances in his endocrine system. When he holds the carcass of a freshly killed deer he feels that he had found what he is ‘for’, but he stops short of declaring that to be the case, unconditionally. For an agnostic, purpose is always a feeling, and never a fact.
In the Divine Comedy, Dante’s vision of Beatrice eventually gave way to a vision of God. First in the promise of Virgil, and then in his meeting with her in Heaven, it was her that encouraged him to continue his ascent. Only at the end did she leave him so he could continue onward to the real source of all beauty. Lewis’s pilgrim, when he finds that there are no boats that can take him across the sea to his Island, discovers the Island is, in fact, a peninsula connected to his old homeland at the other end of the world, so he is forced to return and go by way of what he had previously known as the Landlord’s castle.
George Monbiot, in a recent article, asked if Pope Francis’s religion could ‘be a version of a much deeper and older love? Could a belief in God be a way of explaining and channelling the joy, the burst of love that nature sometimes inspires in us?’
This may be the great difference between faith and secularism. For the religious, the good things of the world are always there as signposts, which will disappoint us if mistaken as goals in themselves. For the irreligious, things are only what they appear to be, so our desire for happiness must find a resolution in physical reality, and the occasional spiritual sensations we experience are merely an overstepping of emotion into the territory of facts.
It may be that rewilding the world will enable us to at last find a home for our spirit, and all our unresolved yearnings will be satisfied. Alternatively, by approaching nature more closely, we might find it awakens a desire for something else entirely. Anecdotally, both outcomes seem to be true for different people at different times, but it is pleasant to find both worldviews coming to an agreement on how to act, here and now. As one side says, the natural world ‘leads us not only to marvel at the manifold connections existing among creatures, but also to discover a key to our own fulfilment’, and the other says that nature is a place to find ‘that rare and precious substance, hope’.
